As usual, even though I was writing the last post in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, it only covered the period up to Christmas. So that’s where we begin.
The blog is still offline because I still haven’t had the time to figure out how to publish it without having it trawled by search engine spiders. We’ll get there. For now, the main thing is just to keep compiling the posts so that we’re all caught up once it does go back online.
So here we go, as if you’d been following along in realtime.
On Little Christmas Eve, December 23, I had an appointment to get my third vax shot. It was a chilly 12km bike ride down to get it, with light and lazy flurries falling. Pretty. On the way home, those flurries became a vicious and hellacious snowstorm. It was accumulating, which made for treacherous biking. And it got dark. Which made for even more treacherousness.
Except… it was Little Christmas Eve and Denmark was getting covered in snow!
It wasn’t much, but it did stick, so we had a white Christmas, one of only a handful the girls have experienced.
The house was in full Christmas mode by the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
As usual, the first official ritual of Christmas Eve was to watch the final episode of Kometernes Jul (“The Christmas of Comets“).
It had absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, except that was set at Christmastime. I’d say it was the worst one we’ve ever watched together as a family, but it’s still so hyggelig to gather around and watch an episode every night of December that it really doesn’t matter how awful it was: it’s every bit as much fun to sit and hate a show together as it is to sit around and love a show together. Or to sit around and argue over whether the show is good or awful. It’s the sitting around together that matters, not the damn show.
After the “thrilling” conclusion of the Christmas calendar show, it was more or less showtime.
Over the course of the holidays I used the good Olympus camera to try and get better pictures than are possible on my new work phone (an iPhone SE).
It was worth it.
That would be my favorite picture of the girls ever: I just wish Maddie didn’t have chocolate all over her teeth. It was Christmas, so of course she had every right to have chocolate all over her teeth, but it was bad of me not to have noticed. And yet, it’s so very Maddie that it’s kind of okay anyway.
And yes, I’m aware I need to work on my camera setting skills. But the blurs seem to add a little life, don’t they? Some kineticism, as the fancy artsty-fartsy people would say?
On the other hand, the pictures without blurring came out pretty nicely.
I swear that I was there, and so was Mette, even though neither of us are in any of those pictures. Although at least Mette is kind of some of these (they’re mostly awful pictures, but I kind of like them in spite of their awfulness—your mileage may vary):
Goddammit. Let me try again without any moving people in the way to screw it all up>
Ah! Much better.
There are no “tearing into the presents” pictures this year, because we’re all older now, and more restrained and respectable.
But Trine was kind enough to gift me a whole troupe of actors to write for and direct, so we introduced ourselves and I ran them through a few acting exercises, culminating with a little scene work.
They’re not very talented—I thought all their performances were all a little wooden.
It was a late night, as Christmas Eve always is, but I stayed up late enough to find that once again, American Santa found a way to stuff our stockings on Christmas Eve so we could all wake up to a little more fun on Christmas Day!
Also, for the permanent record, the following drawing was kind of a group effort: colored pencils and crayons had come out for our now annual Christmas Bingo game and Jørgen began a little sketch, and others eventually contributed to it until we had this finished product:
Christmas Day was, as always in Denmark, not especially Christmassy (from an American point of view). But I did get to have a very picturesque walk in the woods with Didi.
She needed that walk very badly, because while all of us were sleeping on Christmas Eve she apparently found her way into the treats (that had been bagged at the end of the night specifically to keep her from getting into them) and consumed most of a package of cookies.
Bad dog, yes, but really bad owners: who the hell leaves a big bag of cookies and candy on the floor in a house with a golden retriever?
A few days later we had a dinner down on Lyøvej. I only have a couple of pictures. I don’t know why there are so few.
We celebrated New Year’s Eve up in Espergærde with Steve, Elisabeth, Becky, and Sebastian. (We brought Didi instead of Molli because, unlike Molli, Didi had no other plans.)
So, as usual, here are the guards at Amalienborg just before the queen’s speech:
And here’s the perennial “GUD BEVAR DANMARK” shot from the Queen’s speech:
And here’s something new: DR1 typically cuts to a shot of Rådhusplads for the final countdown to the New Year, so that all of Denmark can jump into the New Year just as the first bell chimes. That was a little tricky this year:
It wasn’t technical difficulties: that was just the shot they had, thanks to a little fog thickened up by firework smoke.
But we had no problem jumping into 2022 anyway.
(Tha’s non-alcoholic bubbly, by the way.)
Meanwhile, back in Værløse, Molli had hosted seven or eight friends for an elegant dinner before they all migrated off to their party. So when we returned around noon on New Year’s Day we walked into a slight violation of our “you can have a dinner party as long as you clean up afterwards.”
It wasn’t really that messy, and there was a reasonable explanation: they hadn’t ordered a taxi way in advance, so by the time they ordered one they were told it would be up to an hour before it would arrive. So they started cleaning up, taking their time about it, when suddenly the taxi arrived after only half an hour.
I was less angry about the mess than I was impressed by the signs of civilization suggested by what had been left behind: the food looked so good I was disappointed it was no longer edible.
And in Molli’s defense, she did come home and clean up quickly once she woke up.
And that was it: we were out of 2021 and into 2022 at last.
Which is probably the right point to insert my favorite meme of the month: a list of all the albums that would be celebrating the 50th anniversary of their release in 2022 (“Daddy, what’s an album?”).
Exile is 50 years old? Impossible! That album came out the year my hot young wife was born, and—
Oh.
Sigh.
A propos of nothing:
Still working at home I got cabin fever every now and then all winter, which I solved one weekend in early January with a walk around the lake.
Nothing special about that walk, or the following picture, except that I really like it for some reason. I don’t know why.
Sometimes I could beat the cabin fever, sometimes I just surrendered and let myself go a little stir crazy.
That’s my first and probably last selfie of 2022.
Didi didn’t feel it showed her in a very good light, however, so I got a picture from her good side to earn her forgiveness.
AP Pension made home test kits available for us—we could take up to eight each—so one morning I drove into the office to pick up my kits, and some for a colleague whose whole family was getting covid.
I timed my office visit to be able to take my lunch in the cantina.
Mette treated us all to dinner down on Lyøvej for her birthday. Not a lot of pictures from that event, either—more than what you see here, but they’re all table shots like these and these are (believe it or not) the two best of the set.
Home maintenance note for the permanent record: I’d noticed that our water sanitizer had gone on the fritz back in October. I ordinarily have to fill it with salt tabs every three weeks or so, and October is when I noticed, hm, they don’t seem to be dissolving as fast as they usually do.
I looked the issue up online and the manufacturer’s recommendation, based on the symptoms I’d observed, was just to reset the machine. So I did.
And three weeks later I noticed, hm, still doesn’t seem to be dissolving the salt tabs, and the water level in there seems kind of low. But everything else seemed okay, so I shrugged it off. Busy time of year. Bigger fish to fry and all that.
Unrelated: we sprang a leak in the fyrrum in early December (I think, maybe late November) and had to call an emergency plumber to fix it. A little pipe that had nothing to do with the water sanitizer.
Then at some point after that episode I noticed the salt tabs still weren’t dissolving, but surely they’d start to soon because I could hear the water swooshing through the pipes.
Which I noticed several times over the course of the next week. Normally you only hear that when someone’s showering or running a faucet somewhere. It happens, but it was too much of a coincidence for my every trip to the fyrrum to have been accompanied by such swooshings.
I measured the meters the following Sunday, as I always do, and the water numbers were through the roof: we had used more water in that week than we ordinarily use in a month.
Eventually we discovered the problem: the plumber had apparently configured the pipe valves so that the water bypassed the sanitizer rather than passing through it. Easily done, requires just the turning of two levers. The fix was just to turn them back.
But the period of running without any water had clearly burned out our sanitizer, because now we were getting an error message even when we had the pipes working again:
It took me a while to get through to the manufacturer (BWT), and after some back and forth I was told that P05 is a piston error, and that they’d send a tech out to fix it on February 1st.
So we’ve got that to look forward to.
Meanwhile, I also discovered that the device was installed in November 2019, and has a full warranty.
For two years.
Sigh again.
On one January walk with Didi the moon was so astonishingly large and bright in the winter sky that I even caught her staring at it once or twice.
I took a lot of pictures of it with my phone, which was all I had with me, but none of them did it justice.
In fact, in only one—the one below—was it even clearly visible.
So believe it or not that’s actually an amazing picture of a beautiful spectacle.
(Fricking iPhone SE… grr… mutter mutter…)
Speaking of the wonders of nature, one morning while I was working it suddenly sounded as though the house were being attacked from all sides with birdshot.
In a way it was:
The closeups make it hard to get a sense of proportion.
A wider shot doesn’t help:
What it was, was hail. Hail the size of peas. It didn’t last long but man was it violent!
I can’t remember whether I mentioned it in the last post, but Trine made it her project starting over the holidays to convert the green room into something nicer—and to move the art studio into the smaller guest room.
Because it was her project, not mine, I dropped the ball and didn’t manage to get a set of before pictures to compare to the eventual after pictures, but here at least are some “in progress pictures” that you can enjoy while anticipating the next post’s after pictures. (Teaser: it came out beautifully and you’re all going to want to stay in our gorgeous new guest room, and I hope you all will at some point!)
Having dismantled Maddie’s art studio for the duration of the project, Maddie redirected her painting energies into sketching. She’d received Emma and Jane Eyre for Christmas, and did this sketch of Emma and Mr Knightley, including a tender line of his: If I loved you less I might be able to talk about it more.
I asked her why they lacked faces.
The answer was brilliantly glib:
“Faces are too hard to draw when the heads are that little.”
And finally, Didi informed me that she’d been thinking about it, and after all it was probably the other side of her face that was her good side.
That’s it. We’re caught up.
It’s right up on the edge of February as I write this, a chilly Sunday.
Maddie tested positive for covid on Tuesday (January 25, for the permanent record). She was symptomatic for about 24 hours, feeling pretty sick, and that was about it.
Trine and I were tested on Saturday (the 29th), and this morning (the 30th) we got our results: Trine was positive, I was negative. (Woohoo! The gorgeous new guest room is mine for four days!)
Just an hour or so before she was scheduled for a shift at her bakery job, Molli did a self test. That was also positive. She got a PCR test shortly after (she obviously couldn’t go to work), and we’ll see what that says tomorrow.
We’re scheduled to fly off to Athens exactly two weeks from today.
So I have no idea where the next post will take us, but it surely ought to be interesting.
See you then!
